Friday, May 4, 2007

AGLOCO is for ALL Members

I have blogged a lot lately about Members being AGLOCO founders and how the ‘Members who stick their necks out’ will benefit from AGLOCO’s success. And we must recognize the importance of these efforts. But EVERY Member needs to be able to share in the advantages AGLOCO has to offer. Without delivering on that promise, AGLOCO would fail.

I have seen talk about this for some time now, and I addressed one aspect of this in a previous blog post. Still, the overall value proposition for the “average” Member without any referrals goes back to what I had written before: “You have Viewbar on screen, we pay you for it.”

So, if a Member just wants to be a Member and not recruit new Members (and frankly, 80% to 90% will not), why should they join AGLOCO?

As some Members have also pointed out, I believe the answer to is that AGLOCO’s Membership benefits need to far outweigh any costs.

The key benefits a regular Member will get are a modest but steady financial payout and a functional toolbar that will be useful while browsing the Internet. Compared to what a Member with 2,000 referrals will get if AGLOCO succeeds, this may not seem like much. Some financial payout is still ‘infinitely’ more than these Members get with a Google or Yahoo toolbar, and over time the Viewbar and the AGLOCO website will become a community building forum with useful functionally.

Since AGLOCO Membership and Viewbar software is free, what cost is there?

Signing up takes less than two minutes, the Viewbar download is a one-time install process (updates will be processed automatically … more on that later), the Viewbar uses a small section of space at the bottom of the screen and the current limit of 5 hours of browsing each month is accrued passively while the Viewbar is active on the desktop. AGLOCO only has once a month Member update emails, so overall the ‘cost’ of AGLOCO has been kept very low.

Are there risks? AGLOCO could fail and this small effort could be wasted. But Member privacy is absolutely secure, and there is little else the Member is putting out there to be ‘risked’. Thus, I’d have to say that the risk is also small.

At AGLOCO, we are constantly thinking of the ‘regular’ Member. While we count on the incentives we provide to builders in order to grow the network, without a sound value proposition to ALL Members, surely the company will fail.

Viewbar Update: Our lead tech development engineer is still in Shanghai with the Viewbar team (now seven engineers). Cutting to the point, the current release date is now between 18 and 39 days from today (between Monday March 26th and Monday April 16th). I am told this is all a function of the QA testing results.

There has been a lot of blog discussion related to the technical specifications of the website, and the ‘comments’ section to the last post has acted as a forum for us to hear, respond to, and learn from Member feedback. Thanks to all those who shared their thoughts, both positive and constructive.

Brian Greenwald AGLOCO Development Team